Try googling: "buying a refrigerator". You will find results equal to or better than Become.com's. Is it harder to teach searchers to be more expressive and not confine themselves to keywords or teach them to go to a new site?

/Ira

Here's my Become.com emulator, built to run on Google.

Take a noun (preferably something you shop for) and add this to it, without the quotes:
" reviews"

Search for this new term on Google. Voila.

Let's see how the emulator does on "refrigerator": http://www.google.com/search?q=refrigerator+reviews

Wow. Now those results are pretty good, no?

Google has a few talented developers under their roof. I imagine they could find a way to automate this query+" reviews" technology. :)

Ira and Hank, thanks for sharing your opinions. I agree "buying a refrigerator" and "refrigerator reviews" yield good results at Google, no question. But that still leaves us with several issues:

(1) Is "refrigerator" a shopping-related keyword, or not?

(2) Is the goal of a search engine to deliver the greatest good to the greatest number of searchers, the first time around?

(3) With so many people still using generic keywords, especially in this instance, is it risky to make a bad first impression?

(4) Who is Google trying to satisfy on the "refrigerator" search?

> Is it harder to teach searchers to be more expressive and not confine themselves to keywords or teach them to go to a new site?

My gut tells me they both face strong inertia. I do not have the logfiles for billions of searches, so I cannot speak with certainty on the patterns of query expansion. However, I have seen reports claiming that the majority of searchers use multiple search engines. Granted, that was "horizonal to horizontal" and not "horizontal to vertical" movement between search engines, so your guess is as good as mine.

Thanks for the response, Sean. I completely agree that there's a huge opportunity for specialized search sites. If I were writing the business plan, though, I'd want to be sure that my product couldn't be replicated in 30 minutes (including QA time) by someone as powerful as Google.

I'm not suggesting that consumers should change their behavior and add " reviews" to their Google queries. I'm suggesting that if there's really a business model here, Google could add a ( shop ) button to their ( search ) and (i'm feeling lucky) button set. As a start, this new button could simply search for (x+"reviews").

I've spent some time trying become.com, and I just don't get it. It's a search application that only searches an human-approved subset of all available web pages. Whoop de doo.

Ok, I'll stop sniffing toward these intrepid entrepreneurs and get off my high horse. For now. :)

Looks like someone already beat Google and Become to the punch with the buttons for adding keywords such as "reviews" and "compare prices." I stumbled onto Vmax.com, a brand new search engine still in development. It has alot of different functions. I contacted the company to find out how to advertise. They don't do advertising yet. They said this is still in the very early stages as they beef up the database and the functions. But it looks like once they get this done, this search really has something different to offer.

Hi Sean,
I think you are right on the money. I have been working on trying to make Xerox.com supplies more userfriendly, by getting people to the right results. I have been trying to understand, what , for example, makes someone type "www.xerox.com" as a google search. Or why people would search on the word Xerox rather than coming to the site itself, when their intent is (to me :-) ) clear -- they want supplies for their copier.
After much head scratching, I can say two things:
a) people are always in a hurry. Nobody has time to do it right, but everyone has time to do it again. looking through a history of my own searches, I always seem to search single words first :-( and almost always have to refine the search.
b) It is close to impossible to figure out the "trigger word" that people will pick.

So, definitely, specialized search sites are very valuable.

The trouble is how to get them organized so that the interface is simple -- if I have a google bar and a become.com bar and a dictionary look up, chances are I will just go back to searching on the google bar only.

BTW, if you have suggestions on how to improve the shopping experience on http://www.xerox.com/supplies, or want to rant about it, please let me know -- I would deeply value your suggestions.

-- Vivek